Saturday, December 31, 2011

Let those oil companies just drill away, so we have enough oil right here at home, right? That's what the Republicans have been telling us for years, isn't it? That's how they justify giving billions to the world's most profitable business, while we can't even afford to pay our police and fire fighters at home.

"For the first time, the top export of the United States, the world's biggest gas guzzler, is — wait for it — fuel. Measured in dollars, the nation is on pace this year to ship more gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel than any other single export...Still, the U.S. is nowhere close to energy independence. America is still the world's largest importer of crude oil.

Experts say the trend helps explain why U.S. motorists are paying more for gasoline. The more fuel that's sent overseas, the less of a supply cushion there is at home. Gasoline supplies are being exported to the highest bidder, says Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at Oil Price Information Service. "It's a world market," he says.

The last time the U.S. was a net exporter of fuels was 1949, when Harry Truman was president."

Americans prove themselves once again to be the biggest suckers in the world, falling for the notion that, if they let huge corporations do whatever they damned please, somehow those corporations are going to return the favor by making things better for us. How stupid and ignorant do you need to be to continue to fall for this sort of thing?

But Wait- There's More:

If this whole thing weren't a big enough insult to the American people, consider this:

"Newt Gingrich told conservative activists on Wednesday that Sarah "Drill Baby Drill" Palin would be an ideal candidate for secretary of energy.

"I can't imagine anybody who would do a better job of driving us to an energy solution than Gov. Palin, for example...Tell her that she would certainly be on the list of one of the people we would consider."

Friday, December 30, 2011

Well, I've had real trouble putting this one together. I'm not sure if I'm just bored by the right's lies, or if they decided to go back on their meds for Christmas. Well, I present, you decide:

This news about John McCain: "Appearing on Fox News Thursday morning, Senator John McCain (AZ-R) didn’t mince words when he told Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade that President Obama was to blame for the impasse in Washington over how best to extend the expiring payroll tax cut.

“The president should play much more of a lead role, rather than go shopping for his dog,” he said"

Well, I agree with you there, John. How about if he starts by throwing several dozen Republican congressmen in prison for treason, for deliberately sabotaging the economy? Would that satisfy you? By the way, if he had taken "more of a lead role," you would be screaming that he was interfering with Congress in a Socialist power grab.

And here's a funny comment on this story, from Town Hall:

"If Obama were an effective leader, no one, not even the reasonable Republican opposition would be criticizing him for these things. That is the key. "

Reasonable Republican opposition? What's that?

Or this one: "The Democrats are beside themselves with glee at the thought of pinning an increase in taxes on the middle class on the Republicans. Why else would Obama be so giddy as he buys a chew bone for his dog"

Huh? Man, they sure are angry that Obama has a dog. I'd sure like to see some Psychiatrist analyze that.

Michael Reagan, Town Hall: "Americans Angry at Senate Sycophants...Americans need to kick the Harry Reid Senate down the road not for a period of months, but for a lifetime. We have a clear message for Harry Reid and his utter failure to lead the Senate: The nation is angry and our anger is directed at a legislative body that under Reid's leadership can't do its job."

Of course, Republican betrayal of the country is Harry Reid's fault. You can't win.

A greedy businessman totally indifferent to the fate of the poor...the poster child for liberalism. Right wingers will believe any lie. I've said it before, and I say it again. There has never been a group on earth (okay, except maybe Scientologists) with such an appetite for lapping up lies.

Jerry Shenk, American Thinker: "When you think about it, the only blameless party in our nation's student loan fiasco is the banks."

Of course, if you listen to Pat Buchanan, the only blameless party in World War II was Hitler. Go figure.

And now, for the willing delusion of the month, in the wake of the revelation that Ron Paul is a racist, antisemitic pig:

Leon Wolff, Red State: "I have long theorized that the base of Paul’s support is hardcore anti-war leftists who find Barack Obama insufficiently dovish."

Right, Leon. How astute you are. Hardcore leftists. That's why they have been members of the Republican party for decades.

Bob Owens: "It’s the dangedest thing. The Times is able to find radical support for Paul and use that to undermine the candidate, but were somehow unable to find support from Nazis, Communists, Maoists, socialists and racists for their own beloved Occupy Wall Street movement."

The Times was also unable to find support for Occupy Wall Street from Martians. And for exactly the same reason, interestingly enough. Anyway, what really bothers us is that Ron Paul supports the Nazis, not that they support him.

David P. Goldman, Pajamas Media: "The best option for the Muslim states of the Middle East and Western and Central Asia is liberal democracy. That, I have argued for years, is unattainable. For years, the second-best option was a dictatorship friendly to American interests."

Best for whom? Best for David P. Goldman, I guess. Not so good for the brown people who have to live in a dictatorship, but really, who cares about them. Well, at least I have to credit David with spitting it right out. David continues:

"Americans are not cold enough to initiate a campaign of destabilization."

Oh no, we'd never do that. We'd never, for example, push the democratically elected leader of Iran out, in favor of a vicious dictator whose overthrow led to the current Iranian govermnent. We'd never hire a bunch of drug dealing terrorists to overthrow the legal government of Nicaragua. And certainly, we wouldn't do anything to "destabilize" Iraq. No, we'd never do that. Our hands are clean.

The shortest article of the month. Oh, except for "Republican Economic Ideas that Won't Actually Make Things Worse."

John Ransome, Town Hall: "John Ransom: If You Thought War Expensive, Wait Until You Pay for Obama's Peace. Think the “end” of the Iraq War as announced by Obama is the beginning of peace? Not so fast. In fact, it could be the beginning of bigger and worse war."

Yeah, but it could be the beginning of thousand dollar bills falling out of the sky, too. Or of free Corgis for everyone.

Mike Shedlock, Town Hall: "Attack Dogs Unleashed on Ron Paul...There is no need to rethink endorsements. Here is the deal: Ron Paul did not say the things attributed to him. Can anyone honestly tell me why things Ron Paul did NOT say over twenty years ago should be news today? "

Yeah, you've got a real point there, Mike. Ron Paul didn't say all of those racist, antisemitic, hateful things that were in his newsletter- he only wrote them. And so they clearly don't count. Writing is so left wing and elitist.

Bryan Fischer, Renew America: "When we pick a president, we are in fact choosing a minister of God"

No thanks, Bryan.

David Limbaugh, Town Hall: "my objective observation is that liberals tend to be less aware of and less willing to admit their biases."

"...an Indiana lawmaker wants to criminalize deviant versions sung or played at school functions...Sen. Vaneta Becker, R-Evansville, has introduced legislation that would direct state education officials to set "performance standards" for singing and playing the national anthem at any event sponsored by public schools, charters or state universities.

Singers and musicians would have to sign a contract agreeing to follow the guidelines and would be fined $25 if their performances weren't deemed "acceptable."

I think I'll just invite a guest commentator to respond to this. I wonder how many tens of thousands of dollars of fines this would have been assessed:

Thursday, December 29, 2011

...To call a person what he clearly is? Courtesy ofLittle Green Footballs, this remark about Ron Paul, published at a neo-Nazi website in 2007:

"Comrades:

I have kept quiet about the Ron Paul campaign for a while, because I didn’t see any need to say anything that would cause any trouble. However, reading the latest release from his campaign spokesman, I am compelled to tell the truth about Ron Paul’s extensive involvement in white nationalism."

For those of you who may not be aware of this, "White Nationalism" is a euphemism for Naziism.

"Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays...I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy."

Stormfront has been the leading neo-Nazi umbrella group in the country for decades; American Renaissance is a leading White racist publication; the Institute for Historical review is the world's leading purveyor of Holocaust denial material. Makes you wonder who the "others" were...maybe the Heinrich Himmler Appreciation Society; and makes you wonder what "policy" Ron Paul was discussing with this guy.

"Paul is a white nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position...he really is someone with extensive ties to white nationalism.

Bill White, Commander
American National Socialist Workers Party"

The "American National Socialist Workers Party." That would be as distinguished from the German National Socialist Workers Party, which, as far as I know, ceased to exist in May of 1945.

Well, I guess that sets that straight. Yes, a large part of the Republican "base," rather than accept a candidate who is, in relative terms, somewhat sane, will gladly throw their support behind a man whose ideology is perilously close to the principles of Nazi Germany, and who has willingly associated himself with the pathetic fringe of sociopathic idiots who promote Hitler's views in this country.

This is how far the Republican party has degenerated. We now have a nearly open advocate of Nazi views being hailed as an acceptable leader of their party, while they scream that the current middle-of-the-road, business friendly President is a Communist. The change in Republican ideology has been breathtaking in its swiftness and in the unapologetic adoption of policies and views that would make any decent person cringe. It's quite a lesson in how the German people, faced with worse economic collapse than we have experienced, fell for Hitler's blandishments. One lesson is already too many- let's hope we don't have to take the whole course.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Some wonderful footage of the funeral procession of Kim Jong Il. He was apparently quite the popular guy among the ladies. Don't forget to listen to the tone of voice of the narrator- I think that's the best part.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

I want to talk about what I believe to be the great failure of Obama as president, and in fact the great failure of the Democratic party in the last sixty years.

The Republican party, starting in the years before World War I, has presented to the people a consistent narrative about our country. You know the details: less taxes for the rich mean more money for everyone; the "free market," i.e. big business, is best equipped to set the rules by which we have to live; regulations (that would be laws to protect ourselves from crimes committed by businesses) are illegitimate, although we have a perfect right to be as harsh as we want, to protect ourselves from crimes committed by ordinary people; government always does the wrong thing; Democrats are weak pussies who can't be trusted to run the country, and on and on. Yes, all of this is nothing but an immense mass of lies, but they have repeated it over and over again for a hundred years, and at this point they have succeeded in getting well over half of the country to buy into some part of it or other. And at this point, the Republican party has a whole host of "think tanks," bought and paid for pundits, television news networks, newspapers and all of the rest of it, to push their line 24 hours a day.

What Obama could have done from the day he took office was to present a contrasting narrative, woven not from corporate lies, but from the truth. In this narrative, the Iraq war was one of the greatest military blunders in history, and proceeded directly from Republican thinking. The crash of 2008 was a product of cutting taxes on the rich and deregulation, just like the Republican depression of 1929. Republicans care nothing about our troops, or they wouldn't send them off to die for nothing. Republicans are doing everything they can to destroy Medicare and Social Security, so their backers can get their hands on the money. Endorsing torture is the sign of a person who is as degraded as a child molester, and needs to be treated the same way. People who fight against global warming initiatives are selling future generations into a nightmarish life, for no other reason than to generate short term profits for oil and coal companies. Again, I could go on and on here- you know the rest of it, because you know the truth.

Sure, it's not likely that three years of openly telling the truth would crack the facade of deception so carefully crafted by decades of Republican lies, but we have to start somewhere, and until Democrats begin to tell a consistent and truthful narrative about how we got into the trouble we're facing, there is no chance on earth that we will survive as a free country.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, which specializes in misinterpreting everything in favor of the Republicans, today:

"There are only two possible reasons for House Republicans to behave the way they did. Maybe they are so blinded by ideology that they no longer care about the impact their actions might have on struggling American families. Or maybe their only guiding principle is that anything Obama supports, they oppose."

Still working every day to avoid gazing at the real reason why Republicans act this way: the Republican party is a corrupt conspiracy to do whatever is in the short-term interest of the very rich. They haven't cared about "struggling American families" for a hundred years. They didn't care in the nineteen twenties when they cut the top tax rate by 75% and did away with banking regulations, thereby precipitating the great depression. They didn't care when they pulled the same stunt this time around. "Struggling American families" are nothing but suckers to them, to be lied into stabbing themselves in the back, so we end up in a country where, for example, the six direct heirs of the Walton fortune have more net worth than the bottom 30% of the population.

But God forbid that even an ostensibly liberal columnist like Eugene Robinson should dirty himself by coming into contact with the truth. No, better to just stand by and let the country descend into an oligarchic dictatorship.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

"At that time, we didn't have the knowledge that we have now. At that time, Saddam Hussein was hiding. He was not letting the inspectors from the United Nations into the various places that they wanted to go. The IAEA was blocked from going into the palaces and so forth. And the intelligence in our nation and other nations was that this tyrant had weapons of mass destruction.

And in the light of that- that belief, we took action which was appropriate at the time"

1. We did have the knowledege we have now. Bush, Cheney, et. al. just lied about it
2. Saddam was not hiding. He was sitting at home.
3. Saddam was giving the UN inspectors full access to his country. In fact, they only had to leave because the United States threatened them when we decided to go to war.
4. We had exactly zero intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction; in fact, after years of inspection, we knew that he did not.
5. Our murderous, criminal aggression against Iraq was not based on any of this, since our leaders knew perfectly well that it was a pack of lies, so applying the word "appropriate" to the invasion of Iraq is like calling Jeffrey Dahmer's diet "healthy."

And these lies never die, just like all Republican lies: That it's Republicans, not Democrats who balance the budget, that Republicans give a damn about "our troops," that cutting rich people's taxes makes poor people richer too, that no one needs laws against corporate crime, since CEO's are such morally evolved creatures that they would never do anything that isn't in the country's best interest, that science is not what scientists say it is, but what rich people and religious fanatics say it is, that treating all people fairly is Communism, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, the remedy against these lies is a simple weapon: the truth; but it happens to be a weapon, like nuclear weapons, that is so devastating to the enemy that Democrats, in their altruism, have apparently determined that it must never be used again.

As one human being could be. Today, I mean Tom Friedman. Via Atrios, and thanks toVirtually Speaking, this little contrast. Friedman now:

" the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track?"

Friedman, as you will remember, then:

"What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” Well, Suck. On. This...We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth…"

See, it's not just the Republicans. People like Tom Friedman, hailed far and wide as a responsible, even liberal (my God) journalist, felt free then to indulge in their infantile, homicidal fantasies, and now entitle themselves to lie their asses off to cover up the fact. Oh yes, we were there to bring democracy to the people of the Middle East. Certainly we were.

We were apparently there so immature psychopaths like Tom Friedman could have their jolly old time with the lives of other sorts of people, and now it is apparently our responsibility to forget all that, so they can get back to doing it again as soon as possible.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

"A senior Senate Republican aide I spoke to this morning said the sentiment among some Senate Republican aides is that the House holds no leverage at all. And he suggested a very interesting endgame in this fight for Dems.

“The House has zero leverage,” this Senate GOP aide says. “If I’m Schumer or Reid, what I’d do is let it expire and force the House to come back the next day and pass it.”

And according to a Democratic aide who spoke with Sargent, that appears to be exactly what Democrats are doing...So Democrats are standing firm."

Standing firm. For how long? The last three years have been littered with examples of Democrats not standing firm, even when they held all the cards and the American people were overwhelmingly on their side. Unfortunately, the far more likely scenario is that Congressional Democrats are just milking this for a little (nonexistent) propaganda benefit before caving in to the Republican' vicious, impotent threats. Anyone want to bet that this time will be different?

And while I'm on the subject, it is hardly news at this point that every thing any Republican ever says in public is a lie, but here we have the proof that the supposed Grand Principle of Republicanism, that upon which everything else they do is allegedly based, is just one more gigantic lie. The Republican pledge to never, ever, NEVER raise taxes turns out (what a surprise) to apply only to taxes on the rich, who despite paying historically minimal taxes must not be asked to pay one cent more to rescue the country from the consequences of their own greed. No, it's perfectly all right to raise taxes on everyone else in the country, no matter how much they are suffering economically. As I have said over and over again, the Republican party is a traitorous conspiracy to thieve the nation's wealth for the rich. That is all they are, period.

When I see Democrats start to point that out, maybe I will reconsider the kind of thinking that led me to write the rest of this post.

Monday, December 19, 2011

"Dictator for Life" Kim Jong Il was term-limited out over the weekend. With our political outlook at home so bleak, we can ill afford the loss of someone who has brought us so much innocent humor over the years.

No, I'm not kidding here. This is the most important (and distressing) thing you could possibly read, and so it will turn out to be of virtually no interest to the people who control our mainstream news:

"A new look at U.S. census data painted a stark picture today of poverty. It showed nearly one in two Americans are now in poverty or classified as low-income."

The lightning fast decline of The Greatest Country Ever from the land of opportunity into a third world hellhole has been a frightening spectacle indeed, and is therefore far less worthy a part of our national discourse than, for example, whether Obama broke into a State vault in Hawaii when he was three or four years old and planted a forged birth certificate.

In the meantime, we have Republican Senior Intellectual Newt Gingrich, last heard advocating toilet cleaning as a way for poor children to prepare for a career, now suggesting that, as President, he would be justified in having Federal judges arrested if they didn't decide cases the way he wanted.

So tell me, what word would you use to describe a political system in which things like that happened?

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Man, what difference does it make? At this point, the country is pretty much controlled by the enemy, and the Democrats with the power to do anything about it seem like they'd rather just roll over and go back to sleep.

Obama has turned his back on the decent thing to do way too many times to put up an effective counter-narrative to the Republicans' self-serving, endless avalanche of lies, and pretty much every Democrat in Congress has joined him. I just don't have a clue how we turn things around at this point.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Anyone who thinks the battles in the United States today are between the bottom 99% and the upper 1%; and those people who think they are safe if they can just make it into that top 1%, should consider this piece of information:

"...the six Walton family members on the Forbes 400 had a net worth equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans."

Yes, the end game of the Republican plan is to leave the net worth of this country in the hands of not the top 1%, but of a few hundred families, after the pattern of South American dictatorships of yore. The rest of us will just have to be content to degenerate into near slave status. It is the top hundredth or even thousandth of one percent that the Republican party exists for. The "rich" who are today making half a million or a million a year are on a path to the same place as the guy who was making $200,000 a decade ago and thought that he was sitting pretty, until his world collapsed on him.

And the violent repression that answered even a mild protest by the #OWS people should be enough to let us know what will happen to anyone who makes a real attempt to turn this around.

Now, what evidence does Ben have to support this interesting idea, that FDR, from beyond the grave, is still generating generations of thieves? Get ready for it:

"This week, the Los Angeles Times reported a wave of theft plaguing area high schools. The objects at stake? Tubas. According to South Gate High School music teacher Ruben Gonzalez Jr., thieves broke into the band room and stole nothing but tubas."

Now, how am I going to put this? Ben, when liberals want to make low notes, they generally resort to something more like this:

Now, here are some conservative musicians for contrast:

Notice which one has the tuba? Well, Ben continues:

"Spend five minutes with many poor inner city kids and the sense of entitlement drips from them. Many of these folks are refugee thugs from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"

I mean, what would a right wing rant be without a little racism?

Dave Ramsey, Town Hall: "Dave Says Be Choosey How You Give...My wife and I give the majority of our donations to Christian ministries."

Why not try taking your own advice, Dave?

Wes Vernon, Renew America: "What would you do differently from Obama (if you wanted to bring America down)?"

How about what every Republican politician in the country is doing? That seems to be working. But wait, Wes isn't done with his insightful historical analysis:

"The Marxist view of the world is that if someone has more in worldly goods than you do, it means he is robbing you of what is rightfully your "fair share."

This is the opposite of the Capitalist view of the world, which is that if someone has less than you do, it means he is robbing you of your "fair share," i.e. everything.

Marsha West, Renew America: "Hollywood unraveling the fabric of society...Liberal Hollywood is intentionally corrupting children's morals via the movies and TV programs they produce for public consumption— and it's criminal."

I guess if corporations are people, "Hollywood" is a person too. Now, as a Hollywood person myself, let me tell you the awful truth. We just had a production meeting this morning for the next episode of our TV show, and all we talked about was what we could put on screen in the way of "intentionally corrupting children's morals." And boy, did we come up with some evil ideas!

Well, actually, I was lying. We mainly talked about the shooting schedule and how we could keep the days out down. In fact, that is the number one thing we always talk about. Not that exciting, really, but then, for once, truth is a lot less strange than fiction. Anyway, here's one more insight from Marsha:

"social experiences during adolescence when the brain is still developing can have broad consequences."

Luckily, not a concern for Conservatives, whose brains stop developing around the age of three.

Alan Caruba, Renew America: "Obama is a horrid aberration, the result of a combination of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, and the education community to dumb down Americans and make them ready for the Communist America that Obama advocates."

Just in case you didn't know that already. I had a personal exchange of views with Mr. Caruba once. Let me just say that he doesn't take that well to people that disagree with him; so I'll just leave his comment to speak for itself.

World Net Daily EXCLUSIVE! "WASHINGTON – A messianic rabbi from New Jersey is stunning audiences nationwide by revealing the striking parallels between the fall of ancient Israel and what he suggests are God's early judgments of America."

In case you didn't know, a "Messianic" Rabbi is not a Rabbi at all, but an evangelical Christian pretending to be Jewish, on the theory that crooked Christian "ministers" have missed an opportunity to bilk a whole new bunch of people who they have previously overlooked. By the way, Green Eagle actually read the rest of this idiotic article, and believe me, the parallels between America and ancient Israel aren't really that striking.

Deane Waldman, American Thinker: "Actually, Health Care Costs Are Under Control "

On which planet?

Astute Bloggers: "THE DRONE IS A FAKE DELIBERATELY AIR-DROPPED INTO IRAN WITH BAD TECHNOLOGY IN ORDER TO THROW OFF THE CHICOMS, RUSKIES AND IRANIANS."

Talk about another planet- these guys are in another universe. I mean really- they aren't suggesting that Obama did something right now, are they? By the way, "Chicoms" and "Ruskies?" Have these people been in suspended animation since Doctor Strangelove came out?

Astute Bloggers: "ISLAMO-NAZIS GET MONEY FROM INTERNATIONAL DRUG TRAFFICKING"

Boy, if you could only work pedophile football coaches in there, you'd just about have all the bad guys on earth in one pile.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Courtesy of Media Matters, this wonderful chart from Fox News of the nation's unemployment rate:

Observe from this chart that the current 8.6% unemployment rate is exactly the same as the 9.0% unemployment rate the month before, and is far above the 8.8% unemployment rate from last March. Math is a wonderful thing when you are a Republican.

Senator Lindsay Graham yesterday, on the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a branch of the Federal Government created in 2010 by an act of Congress:

"So this consumer bureau that they want to pass is under the Federal Reserve...It is something out of the Stalinist era."

Yes, it is not just Communism, but Stalinism, for a single government agency to exist in order to protect consumers instead of oil companies and multinational corporations. If you go to their website, you will see such subversive topics discusses as how to submit a mortgage complaint, or how to handle your student debt- malicious ideas that are undoubtedly going to result in the murder of tens of millions, just like with Stalin.

And do not forget that Lindsay Graham is constantly classed as one of the "reasonable" Republicans, which at this point apparently means he only compares Obama to Stalin, and not Satan.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

“Remember, there was no Palestine existing as a state. Part of the Ottoman Empire."

Of course, by that logic, the following countries also don't exist: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Lebanon, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, the Sudan, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Rumania, and a bunch of others.

I suppose we have good reason to also doubt the legitimate existence of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, Kentucky, Michigan and large parts of New York, since they were once part of the Iroquois Confederacy.

This is the ignorant, shoot-from-the-hip logic which qualifies one to be well informed by Republican standards. Sad, isn't it?

Of course, the response of the Palestinian authority to this remark isn't much better:

"The most racist remark I have ever seen,” said Saeb Erekat, a top negotiator for a new Palestinian state and a close advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas."

Listen, Saeb, if that is the most racist thing you have ever seen, you really need to get out more. How about this, for example, from your boss:

"In 1982, Mahmoud Abbas, later to become President of the Palestinian Authority wrote his doctoral thesis which later became a book, The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. In the book, Abbas raised doubts that gas chambers were used for extermination of Jews, and suggested that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust was "less than a million", claiming secret ties between the Nazis and the Zionist movement. He also claimed that the Holocaust was a joint Zionist-Nazi plot, writing "The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule, in order to arouse the government's hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them, and to expand the mass extermination."

Depends on whose ox is gored, huh? Newt and Abbas- they deserve each other. Too bad that none of the rest of us deserves either one of them.

Friday, December 9, 2011

And they don't want to get it. Latest Example- Michael Gerson, in the Washington Post:

"In the news coverage of Newt Gingrich’s rapid rise, there is wonderment that evangelicals are willing to forgive his serial offenses against the Seventh Commandment."

Gerson naturally tries to explain this phenomenon with a bunch of nonsense about how right wing Christians supposedly love reformed sinners. This might be believable if it weren't for the obvious fact that Republican sinners don't even need to pretend to reform to get their votes, while Democratic sinners can reform from now until doomsday without getting a shred of forgiveness from right wingers.

No, I have stated the real reason for this phenomenon over and over again. The simple truth is that American Conservatism is about one thing and one thing only, to the exclusion of all else: Cut My Taxes. Give me all the free Government services I want, but don't charge me a penny for something that benefits anyone else. All the rest is window dressing, to convince not us, but themselves, that despite their grotesque greed and hatred, they hold the moral high ground.

I have been saying this for years, and every day there is more evidence for it. It's time for people like Michael Gerson to accept the ugly truth.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

"House Republicans Push Bill To Ban Abortions Based On The Race Or Sex Of The Fetus...For House Republicans, this year has been the year of outlandish answers to non-existent problems. And tomorrow, they will offer the magnum opus of their 2011 campaign against a woman’s right to choose: the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA). The bill seeks to somehow protect the “civil rights” of fetuses by banning physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’s race or sex."

Now, a fetus is presumably the same race as its parents. Apparently, these parents are committing a racist murder against their own race. There is just no end to the misuse of the legislative process that is just dandy with Republicans, as a perfectly fine substitute for any sort of real attempt to deal with the nation's problems. I suppose that this is because dealing with our problems would involve admitting that they were all caused by the previous round of Republican behavior, so it's easier to just continue the sideshow.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

It is with considerable sadness that I report the death of one of the last links to the great era of the Chicago Blues, Hubert Sumlin, who was Howlin' Wolf's guitar player for many years. Here is Sumlin playing an extended version of Killing Floor, my favorite Howlin' Wolf song to play:

Sunday, December 4, 2011

"Fuel rods inside one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have completely melted and bored most of the way through a concrete floor, the reactor's last line of defence before its steel outer casing, the plant's operator said.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said in a report that fuel inside reactor No 1 appeared to have dropped through its inner pressure vessel and into the outer containment vessel, indicating that the accident was more severe than first thought.

The revelation that the plant may have narrowly averted a disastrous "China syndrome" scenario comes days after reports that the company had dismissed a 2008 warning that the plant was inadequately prepared to resist a tsunami."

And remember, this plant was built by an American company, which has produced many of our own reactors, and was located in a country acclaimed for the strongest nuclear safety regime anywhere in the world. Also, please remember that every one of these incidents that has ever occurred has been followed by endless lies attempting to minimize public knowledge of the damage.

I want to direct you toward an excellent piece today by Maureen Down, highlighting the total lunacy involved in the return of Newt Gingrich to prominence in the Republican party.

Who knew he wrote his Ph.D dissertation on the Belgian rule of the Congo, attempting to justify a colonial regime which was so barbarous that it shocked and disgusted even the other European colonial countries:

"Of the Europeans who scrambled for control of Africa at the end of the 19th century, Belgium's King Leopold II left arguably the largest and most horrid legacy of all.

While the Great Powers competed for territory elsewhere, the king of one of Europe's smallest countries carved his own private colony out of 100km2 of Central African rainforest...the king unleashed new horrors on the African continent.

He turned his "Congo Free State" into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people."

And yet Newt's take on this was, "hey, let's look at the good side!"

There's much more in Dowd's piece, which is a great example of her patented sarcasm, which at least today has found a deserving target. But just consider that Republicans are apparently willing to have our country led by a man who demostrates a life-long willingness to advocate for the most brutal exploitation of other people and other countries. If you don't get where this is leading our country, you have your head buried in the sand.

I mean of course, the one we live on and the one where Republicans live.

On our planet, one of the few major anti-global warming figures got a grant from the Koch brothers to debunk all the previous global warming data, and ended up announcing that the previous studies were all true. On our planet:

"Alas, a favorite climate change denial trope is on its deathbed. Specifically, the claim that modern polar ice sheets formed during a period of rising carbon dioxide. New analysis of CO2 levels from the time, about 33 million years ago, show the greenhouse gas dropping sharply and the ice caps forming right alongside"

"NOAA: Arctic worse than in 2005...The report, written by 121 scientists from around the world, said statistics point to a shift in the Arctic health in 2006. That was right before 2007, when a mix of weather conditions and changing climate led to a record loss of sea ice, from which the region has never recovered. This summer's sea ice melt was the second worst on record, a tad behind 2007."

Not so in the galaxy that the Republicans have transported themselves to. Remember "Climategate," the cache of stolen e-mails from a university in East Anglia that Republicans claimed somehow proved that every climate scientist in the world was involved in some gigantic, purposeless conspiracy? Well, this wingnut pseudoscandal resulted in the massive waste of time of seven (yes, seven) scientific, academic reviews of their ludicrous claims, every single one of which found the claims to be patently false.

But now we have Climategate 2! The right wingers have gone through these e-mails again, and are again falsely claiming to have found evidence that global warming is a scientific conspiracy. Of course, remember that these are second-string e-mails that proved nothing the first go-around. But there's no stopping them. Here is a small, and I mean small, sample of the sort of edifying information conservatives are reading the last few days:

"Ed Driscoll, PJ Media: "‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Climate Apocalypse’...ClimateGate and the global financial meltdown are making the doomsday religious cult of global warming look awfully cartoon-like. "

Climategate having been rejected as a right wing lie by sane people, but still...

Washington Times: "The latest release of 5,000 emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) reconfirms what the 2009’s “Climategate” files established: Global warming is more fiction than science."

What 2009's Climategate established is that there is no end to the lies that right wingers will tell when they get paid to.

Big Government: "Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming"

"Once Again" caught in nothing but doing their job. And these right wing commenters are hard at work at their job too- lying their asses off.

Forbes Magazine: "A new release of incriminating e-mail exchanges between leading climate scientists that is now being termed “Climategate II” actually represents but another episode in a continuing scandal that has been taking place for decades. This fraud of massive scope and consequence has served as the basis for arguably the greatest regulatory overreach of all time...“

Believe me, I could have provided you with another hundred things like this. If you really want to see how blatantly dishonest this stuff is, I suggest you try this article at Discover Magazine.

Do I need to add that there is absolutely no chance of ever dealing with any of the problems facing our country, even something as clear-cut as the danger of global warming, as long as the fantastically rich are allowed to raise a population on their lies?